Preparing Your Poems for Submission

The Mslexia poetry competition has now closed, but you can still send your poems to the magazine as part of their rolling submission themes, or just subscribe. Mslexia is a fantastic resource for writers, both male and female, though it is of course primarily aimed at women writers.

Meanwhile, the third part of my poetry workshop is up on the site.

It's about Preparing your Poems for Submission, and is intended for those getting ready to submit a new batch of work to a magazine or publishing house.

I hope it's useful, and many thanks to Mslexia for the opportunity to run this new series of workshops on their website, which you must visit if you're a writer of any kind. It has fabulous resources which are absolutely free. 

"Try not to revise your poetry where reading aloud is impossible (in an office environment, for instance, or on public transport).

Reading aloud is about more than the sound of your voice. It impacts on your body too, your facial expression and gestures, the way you hold yourself.

When reading a poem silently, it’s easy to ignore the sounds and rhythms, and make changes based purely on line length or other cosmetic considerations. That's not to say these are unimportant. But the two should work in tandem."

Mslexia Workshop: Encouraging New Poems

The next instalment of my writing workshops for the Mslexia 2011 Poetry Competition, judged by Jo Shapcott, is now up on the Mslexia website.

It's entitled Encouraging New Poems.

Poems beget poems. The more poems you write, the more you will find waiting to be written. So when you hit a rich vein, don’t rest after you’ve finished your first draft and put it aside to mature. Keep hammering away at the wordface. 

Ted Hughes believed that poem sequences are a good way of generating new poetry, particularly during a creative dry spell. Sometimes you sit down to write something new and the words won’t come. Linking poems together can help to maintain the momentum of previous inspiration ...

Read more and follow the exercises for this instalment.

The Writing Spark

It's that time of year again. Mslexia, the women's writing magazine, are holding their annual Poetry Competition 2011, and have asked me to provide another series of online workshops to accompany it. Deadline for entries to the competition is July 18th.

These particular workshops guide you through the process of writing a poem from the initial spark of an idea through to submitting to a competition or magazine.

Apparently, the workshop series I created for Mslexia last time was a very popular feature of the website, which is highly gratifying. It's always good to know you've helped someone else with their writing, and even better when it's several someones!

Anyone interested in following the series this year, you can find workshop number one here. It's entitled THE SPARK OF A POEM.

The next few workshops should follow soon. Once that happens there'll be links in the Mslexia sidebar to guide you through to them. The last series are also still on the site. Just search for "Holland Workshops" and a list of previous writing workshops should pop up.

Creative Redrafting Workshops

Since I've been discussing creative redrafting on Facebook these past few days, I thought it might be a good idea to post up some links to my 2010 Creative Redrafting Workshops.

They were originally written for redrafting poems, but apply equally to prose. 

My online workshops were commissioned by the women's writing magazine Mslexia and appeared in five parts, now gathered together at their workshops links page:


Part 1
First Drafts are Not Holy Relics -
"Have you ever abandoned a difficult first draft that was going nowhere?"

Part II
Second Draft Onwards -
"Dare to do the thing that frightens you: rewrite in an entirely new way."

Part III
Building a Family Tree -
"Mixing it up with a little incest may be the most profitable way forward."

Part IV
Find the Core -
"Every poem has a secret core on which its power depends."

Part V
Strong Redrafts are New Creations In Their Own Right -
"The most obvious way to spot when a poem is finished is when you become heartily sick of it."


Hope you enjoy working with some of my redrafting ideas. If you have any feedback on the workshop suggestions and exercises, please do post your comments here below!

Fifth and Final Creative Redrafting Workshop up at Mslexia

I had some absolutely fantastic and heartwarming feedback today via the women's writing magazine Mslexia - people finding my recent series of Creative Redrafting workshops on the Mslexia website useful and full of practical, hands-on advice for reworking those old and abandoned poems.

The fifth and final workshop in the series is up now at Mslexia, a special series run in support of their annual Poetry Competition, to be judged by Vicki Feaver this year, with a first prize of £1000.

More Mslexia Workshops now available

Interested in Writing as Genetics?

Or redrafting your poems as Building a Family Tree?

My third short article based around the theme of Creative Redrafting is now up on the Mslexia site.

Get it while it's hot!

 

Mslexia Poetry Workshops

Just spotted that the first two instalments of my series of five linked articles on Creative Redrafting are now live on the Mslexia website.

Some of my weary but faithful regular readers may remember my first tentative blog posts on Creative Redrafting a few years back. Some may even have survived one of my workshop sessions using the technique. Well, this is an updated and expanded version of the same theory of poem revision, which will hopefully be useful for someone out there.

This particular incarnation of Creative Redrafting is a poetry workshop series specially commissioned by Mslexia to accompany their 2010 Poetry Competition, the idea being that you hone your competition entries by working through my suggestions - and those of fellow poets whose advice I solicited for this series - and improve your redrafting skills at the same time.

Experienced poets, writers and editors who contributed their know-how for these articles include Helen Ivory, Alison Brackenbury, Sophie Mayer, Annie Finch, Zoe Skoulding, Anne Berkeley and Nuala Ní Chonchúir.  

Many thanks to you all!

Mslexia: Short Fiction Exercises

This, by Laura Fish, has just gone up on the Mslexia site for women who write. It's all part of the online run-up to the Mslexia Short Story Competition, which is to be judged by Tracy Chevalier, and which closes on January 25th 2010.

For my own part, I've been commissioned to contribute a series of five articles on the art of rewriting poems for the Mslexia website, due to be published March 2010.

The Mslexia articles will feature nuggets of wisdom from other established poets alongside my own suggestions. Watch this space for further details!